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idealism of beauty as final truth,— this is his Lenduring refuge.

From these five odes, as fragments of himself, we can construct the full stature of the intellectual man. In the early years he did live disproportionately in the senses. Romantic love was an absorbing motive. The "Ode to Psyche" shows this love yielding precedence to other themes. From the ode "To Autumn" may be reasonably inferred his continuing joy in out-of-doors. It is in the "Ode on Melancholy" that we find him striking deep into pessimism. It may be a platitude that he who enjoys most keenly must suffer most poignantly; but Keats feels this with such intensity that it ceases to be a platitude. He discovers, moreover, that melancholy is not morbid; it is normal, an inevitable element in mortal fate. In the “Ode to a Nightingale” he finds an escape from pessimism in nature. Yet nature, whatever her strength of appeal, can bring to him only a temporary relief. Nature may have her eternal note of comfort. Keats can seize it; he cannot hold it. Wordsworth seized and held in his consciousness

an ever-enduring power

And central peace, subsisting at the heart
Of endless agitation.

Keats found in nature only intense transitory pleasure. He had for her no transcendental vision. But he did have this vision for art. In art as symbolized by the urn he found a permanent refuge from pessimism. There he was secure from Melancholy - who dwells with "Beauty that must die" - the beauty of form and substance. In the idealism of art he attained fixity of faith in transcendental beauty and truth and rested content. For these divine ideas, illusive, metaphysical, like the necessary vagueness of our notion of God, can never become earthly idols or be destroyed by realization. Art, therefore, is akin to religion.

So Keats stands, in his full stature, as the pure artist, with a triumphant pagan faith.

XXIII

THE PRINCIPLE OF BEAUTY

T was "Hyperion" that turned the tide of Keats' reputation toward fame. Note its effect on three men. Shelley, previously tepid, was stirred by it to an enthusiasm that gave sincerity to his "Adonais." Byron, disgusted at the early work, had cried, "No more of Keats, I entreat. Flay him alive." Later he wrote, "The fragment of 'Hyperion' seems actually inspired by the Titans and is as sublime as Eschylus." De Quincey's censure of "Endymion" was as severe as the "Quarterly's." He called "Hyperion' "the greatest of poetical torsos" and added that it had the simplicity, the austere beauty, the majesty of Greek temples. Posterity agrees with these judgments.

Why did "Hyperion" conquer the prejudice and compel this admiration? A clear answer requires some preliminary study of Keats' conception of beauty.

He lived like a hermit in seclusion. In "The Palace of Art" Tennyson portrays the experience of a soul isolated among æsthetic pleasures. It is lord over nature, lord of the visible earth, lord of the five senses. The end of that exclusive devotion to art is nausea. Keats' artistic life is a parallel with a different conclusion. His isolation produced no nausea; it produced great poetry and a passion for length of days. And the reason is that he preserved the freshness of creative desire.

"I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination," he wrote in the first flush of his career. He continued in that enthusiasm. The lustre of his imagination shed over reality the glamour of beauty. Wordsworth's Immortality ode was at once a source of inspiration and dread The elder poet lost the visionary gleam with his youth and turned to the consolations of the primal sympathies and the philosophic mind. Keats had no primal sympathies for Matthews and Leech-gatherers, and he fought off the philosophic mind like a disenchantment. He wanted to perpetuate the glory and the freshness of the dream in which the imagination remains the eye among the blind and the earth seems appareled

in celestial light. And he did it; he preserved his youth. Aubrey De Vere remarks that for Keats there is a peculiar aptness in the phrase "a child of song.

This imagination, as we have already shown, he used in the conciliation of the sensuous and the ideal. "Men," says Ruskin, "having naturally acute perceptions of the beautiful, yet not receiving it with a pure heart, nor into their hearts at all, never comprehend it, nor receive good from it, but make it a mere minister to their desires, an accompaniment and seasoning of lower animal pleasures, until all their emotions take the same earthly stamp and the sense of beauty sinks into the servant of lust." It is Keats, with his holiness of the heart's affections and his imagination conceiving beauty as truth, who has shown the better way. Epicureanism and Platonism are commonly regarded as antipathies. The pillar saints, like St. Simeon Stylites, maintained an absolute divorce between the senses and the spirit. Keats, anticipating Browning's "Rabbi Ben Ezra," reached a healthy humanism in which the flesh helps the soul and the soul helps the flesh. And this doctrine in his poetry makes his art fulfill its divine mission.

Schiller has a fine passage bearing upon this